Tim Cavanaugh:
What the hell is going on at Duke University that a professor of public policy, drawing on the hard-won wisdom of a junior, could write a New York Times op-ed piece that lacks even a junior-high civics-class familiarity with the U.S. Constitution? And who’s minding the rear gate at the Grey Lady’s opinion section that the paper would publish something so shoddy?
You’ll be asking yourself these and other questions after reading “Cancel the Midterms,” a passionate call to return the former (and future?) British colonies in America to a more kingly state. The piece is by Duke professor David Schanzer and student Jay Sullivan (2016).
The title of the piece is just clickbait for a piece about an election that has Democrats trembling, but Schanzer and Sullivan have a proposal that’s more inane than simply canceling Tuesday’s vote. They want to eliminate the gross injustice of having members of Congress justify their jobs every two years. “There was a time,” they write, “when midterm elections made sense — at our nation’s founding, the Constitution represented a new form of republican government, and it was important for at least one body of Congress to be closely accountable to the people. But especially at a time when Americans’ confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, two-year House terms no longer make any sense.”
Leave aside the lame and unspecific claim that humanity has evolved in some fundamental way in a mere 200 years. (You get no credit for guessing that “hyper-accountability” has been called into being by a magical threesome of buzzwords: “Twitter,” “video cameras,” and “24-hour cable news.”) Instead, parse the logic a little: Schanzer and Sullivan are saying that because voters don’t have enough confidence in their government, they should be given even less control over it.
That would seem to be a problem if you think the country should be serving its citizens. But the professor and the junior don’t actually care about the voters. Their concern is for the leader:
